7.18.2010

A wedding is a singular event, lasting a few hours. Yet, a marriage is a process, made up of days, weeks, hopefully, years. Sometimes couples stay together "one day at a time," believing that things will improve or change. I support that belief. A cliche that you may have heard is, "Just don't leave the first year."

The first year was the hardest for me, and it is the hardest for many couples, especially as we marry later in life and are more set in out ways (which really means, we're more rigid in our thinking patterns.) Yet, couples that delay marriage until their mid-30's have more satisfying marriages.
Either way, most men and women want to find a mate and we continue to see marriage as the culmination of a dream: the beginning of a family, creating a lifestyle, pursuing goals with a partner.
But, yes, the economic slide affected wedding planning. Read below:

"Weddings remain a multibillion-dollar industry and summer is the busiest season. There were about 2.2 million weddings in 2009, with each event averaging 128 guests, according to The Wedding Report Inc., a research company that tracks the wedding industry. But the wedding business may slowly be eroding in the fragile economy. The average cost for a wedding dipped in 2009 to about $19,500 from a peak of $28,700 in 2007, said The Wedding Report Inc. So far this year, wedding spending has improved -- with the economy -- to an average of $23,800.